1. EDITORS CORNER:
2. TECH BRIEFING:
* MS CLUSTERING ARCHITECTURE TERMS DEFINED
3. NT RELATED NEWS
* QUICK OVERVIEW OF W2K PRODUCT FAMILY
* SUNBELT DISASTER RECOVERY (DR) LIST TAKES OFF WELL
* MICROSOFT SITE THWARTS TUESDAY HACK ATTEMPT
* WANT TO SEE THE GUTS OF A W2K MAINFRAME?
4. NT THIRD PARTY NEWS
* FREE TEM 25 USER LICENSE WITH ALL ORDERS OVER $1,000.
5. HINTS AND TIPS
6. THE NT STOCK WATCH - Feb 25, 2000
7. HOW TO USE THE MAILING LIST
Instructions on how to subscribe, sign off or change your address.
*************** SPONSOR: ST. BERNARD SOFTWARE *******************
Now you see it.................... Now you don't.
Don't let your data do a disappearing act on you. Trusted by
leading cutting edge companies as the ultimate source of data
protection, Open File Manager is the only open file solution
that works with all leading backup packages and guarantees 100%
data capture.
www.stbernard.com
**********************WHAT IS W2Knews?***************************
Sunbelt W2Knews (the original NTools E-News) is the World's first
and largest E-Newsletter designed for NT/2000 System Managers that
have the job to get and keep NT up & running in a production
environment. Sunbelt launched this electronic newsletter early 1996.
Every week we keep the Windows NT/2000 community informed and aware
of new developments of NT and 3-rd party System Management Tools.
You get hints and tips that will enable you to better utilize and
understand Win NT/2000 and help to pass your Certification Exams.
Info and Stu's bio: http://www.sunbelt-software.com/w2knews.htm
Via (separate) NTools E-NewsFlashes we will send you important
breaking news like new service packs, killer viruses, etc. Sunbelt
Software is the first and largest provider worldwide of Third
Party System Management Tools for Windows NT. Tell Your Friends!
All back issues are here, searchable and indexed on key words:
http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=nt-list&text_mode=0
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. "EDITORS CORNER"
Hi NT/2000 Pro's,
This weekend I'm flying to Paris and Amsterdam to visit the Sunbelt
Offices in Europe. That means the next issue may be a day or two
later than normal. And after hesitating for a long time I have taken
the step to change from one ISP to another for my home office. The
cable modem I had with GTE was technically fine, but their mail
servers continued to have problems. I'm a big fan of the old rule
'if it ain't broke don't fix it' but this time I just _had_ to!
A few of my colleagues used the Time Warner's road runner cable
modem service and had no problems what so ever for extended periods
of time. More over, they provide tech support through the weekends
(GTE did not) and that is what I needed for my home office. So I
grudgingly made the change, but it went surprisingly well.
Instead of GTE's fixed IP address system, Time Warner uses DHCP
to allocate IP addresses dynamically which is actually easier and
seems to work just fine for a large scale project like this. There
are thousands of cable modems in this area. But again, as a consumer
I chose for GOOD SUPPORT as my main reason to move. And that's why
Sunbelt offers you mainframe quality support as well. We can get
you 24x7, all year round if you need that.
OOOPS: Last Issue I wrote: "The software that did the web-clustering
was the IP load balancing built into Win2K called WLBS." But.. WLBS
was on NT4.0, now it's called Network Load Balancing Service (NLBS).
Warm regards,
Stu Sjouwerman
Email me at my NEW EMAIL address:
[email protected]
********************************************************************
2. TECH BRIEFING:
* MS CLUSTERING ARCHITECTURE TERMS DEFINED
(Wondered where the term WolfPACK came from? Get ready to take notes,
make some sketches for yourself and learn some new words. Stay with
me now and take a sip of coffee!)
So, your company expands in the booming economy. You need to manage
50 or 100% growth every 12 months. How the heck are you going to do
it? We're talking Architecture here. Better plan well ahead, because
if you get stuck in a non-scalable situation it can cost a lot. If
you plan to outsource or co-locate, better make sure that your co-lo
provider has their architecture mapped out right.
You must be able to start small and grow as the demand increases.
If you run an e-commerce site you'd better be able to grow FAST as
well. You can grow by Scaling UP or by Scaling OUT. Upscaling is
replacing your existing servers with new, bigger ones. Outscaling
means you add more servers to the existing ones.
This last approach has created the expression 'buying computing by
the slice' and 'building systems from CyberBricks'. Let's define
one more term: FARM. This is the collection of all the servers,
applications and data at a particular site. The whole farm is
managed as a unit, with common staff and management policies.
For disaster tolerance, a farm needs to be replicated at one or
more geographically remote farms. You can use Double-Take for that
for instance. A collection of farms is called a GEOPLEX. If a
farm fails, the other(s) continue to provide the services till the
failed site is repaired.
You can grow a farm in two ways: CLONING, or PARTITIONING. You can
CLONE a service on many replica nodes that each run the same data
and software. Requests are load balanced between the clones. You
can load balance the requests externally to the clones with a so
called 'IP sprayer' like CISCO LocalDirector. Or you can have the
clones do it between themselves internally with an 'IP Sieve' like
the built-in Network Load Balancing Server.
If you have a bunch of clones that do the same work, in MS lingo
these are called RACS. (Reliable Array of Cloned Services). Cloning
and RACS offer you both scalability and availability: one clone
dies and the others take over if you have the right setup defined.
It's a great way to add CPU power, network bandwidth and storage
bandwidth to a farm.
PARTITIONS grow a service by duplicating the hardware and software
but by dividing the data among the nodes. For example mail servers
would partition by mailboxes, or sales application systems would
partition by different geographic sales territories. Partitioning
does not get you better availability as the data is only stored
in one place. The solution for that is to create them as PACKS.
You can implement these PACKS as active-active (both take over for
each other) or active-passive where one is a hot-standby but does
nothing. Again, Double-Take allows you to set up both of these.
And, to stay consistent and invent another word, these are called
Reliable Arrays of Partitioned Services (RAPS).
So now, you can build a multi-tier architecture using both RACS and
RAPS with a front-tier that interfaces with your users (website for
instance), a middle-tier that contains your business logic, and
a data-tier (SQL 70.0 servers) that manages your storage.
Here is a Glossary that gives you these terms tightly defined.
Active-Active: A pack or geoplex architecture in which all members
are actively processing some work (in contrast to active-passive).
Active-Passive: A pack or geoplex architecture in which one member
is actively processing work and the other member(s) is passively
waiting for fail-over (in contrast to active-passive).
Availability: The fraction of the presented requests that a system
services within the required response time.
Clone: A replica of a server or service. The clones of a service are
called a RACS. Requests are distributed among the clones within a RACS.
CyberBrick: The unit of hardware growth in a farm, often it is a
commodity system that is added to a RACS or RAPS.
Fail-over: A partition may fail on one node and be restarted on a
second node of a pack, and a RACS or RAPS may fail on one farm of
a geoplex and be restarted on a second farm of a geoplex.
Farm: A site containing many servers and services, but managed as
a single administrative entity. A farm contains RACS and RAPS. A
farm may be part of a geoplex.
Geoplex: A farm that is replicated at two or more sites, so that if
one site has a catastrophic failure, the second site can service
the load and thereby provide continuous availability.
Load Balancing: The process of distributing requests among clones
of a RACS and distributing partitions among members of a pack in
order to provide better response time.
Pack: A collection of servers that can each host a partition.
When a partition?s current server fails, the partition fails over
to another member of its pack. Packs improve availability.
Partition: A part of a service that has been divided among a RAPS.
Each partition services a specific part of the overall service.
Mail servers and database servers are often partitioned in this way.
RACS (Reliable Arrays of Cloned Services): A collection of clones
all performing some service. Requests are directed to the RACS,
and processed by one of the clones. The RACS is managed as a single
entity.
RAID (Reliable Array of Independent Disks): A group of disks that
are aggregated to improve availability, bandwidth, or management.
RAPS (Reliable Arrays of Partitioned Services): A collection of
clones all performing some service. Each request to the RAPS is
directed to the appropriate partition and processed by that partition.
The RAPS is managed as a single entity.
Scalability: The ability to grow the power or capacity of a system
by adding components.
Scale Up: Expanding a system by incrementally adding more devices
to an existing node, typically by adding cpus, disks, and NICs to
a node.
Scale Out: Expanding a system by adding more nodes, complete with
processors, storage, and bandwidth.
Shared Disk: A pack, clone, or geoplex architecture in which disks
and state are shared among the services. In a packed partitioned
architecture, the disks may fail-over when the partition migrates
to a new member of the pack.
Shared Nothing: A pack, clone, or geoplex architecture in which
disks and state are not shared among the services ? rather the state
is replicated at each clone or pack member. In a packed partitioned
architecture, the disks do not fail-over when the partition migrates
to a new member of the pack, rather the partition uses the local
replica of the state.
Transparency: In general hiding implementation details from the
clients. In the context of scalability, hiding the partitioning,
cloning, and geoplexing from the clients. Client requests are
automatically routed to the correct partition or clone.
All of this comes out of an extremely useful (much more in detail)
white-paper that is available from Microsoft Research. FTP it from:
http://research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-99-85
Discuss these items with colleagues at the Sunbelt DR-list. Sub at:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/dr_list_charter.htm
Ready? Set... Build!
********************************************************************
3. "NT RELATED NEWS"
* QUICK OVERVIEW OF W2K PRODUCT FAMILY
I created a grid with the basic data you need to understand the
differences between the different flavors, and a recommendation of
the actual hardware you need to run it in a production environment.
The so called 'minimum requirements' for the environment that MS
includes make no sense what so ever. I have no clue why they print
numbers like a 133Mhz CPU for W2K Advanced Server in their overviews.
Anyway, the mysteries of Public Relations are over my head. Here is
the simply grid I created for you with the basics and our viewpoints.
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/w2k_family.htm
------------------------------
* SUNBELT DISASTER RECOVERY (DR) LIST TAKES OFF WELL
The brand new DR list already has 350 subscribers. What can you do
on this list? Discuss DR Admin and Tech problems and/or workarounds,
how to, what to, why to, type questions platform independent. How
to build Geoplexes, Farms, RACS, RAPS, Clones, and Fail-Over plans.
And most important: ON TOPIC, LOW NOISE, and FRIENDLY. This is no
place for O/S wars. Sign up here and ask your HOW TO questions. No
time like _now_ to get your Disaster Recovery plans implemented !
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/dr_list_charter.htm
------------------------------
* MICROSOFT SITE THWARTS TUESDAY HACK ATTEMPT
MS said late Wednesday that hackers had tried to topple its Web site,
but had done little damage. The Tuesday morning ambush did not crash
the Web site as in other cases, but caused a brief slowdown of about
3 to 7% in the initial page viewing. Basically, they have SO much
capacity that it's very difficult to shut them down, and the W2K OS
they are running the site on, apparently held up to against the attack.
More: http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2564535656-e8a
------------------------------
* WANT TO SEE THE GUTS OF A W2K MAINFRAME?
The only machine that currently is able to support the full 32 CPU
capacity of Windows 2000 Datacenter in one box is the Unisys ES7000
machine. The specs are interesting, and Redmond has one of these
puppies that they use to tweak their 'big fat flavor' of W2K.
Want to see the guts of this puppy instead of all the slick design
marketing materials? Here are some inside scoop specs: 32 Intel CPU's
intermixing Pentium III Xeon and Itanium 64 bit processors (in groups
of four). 64 GB RAM, 96 PCI bit slots. All of this interconnected with
a 32 GB (gigaBYTE per second) crossbar bus. Partitionable in 4 CPU
increments into different instances of the OS - NT 4.0, W2K, Unix.
But here is the fun, see the hardware goodies I found for you!
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/es7000.htm
********************************************************************
4. NT THIRD PARTY NEWS
* FREE TEM 25 USER LICENSE WITH ALL ORDERS OVER $1,000.
Super W2K Promo from Sunbelt
I am personally excited to bring you a tremendous offer from Sunbelt
and one of our top products, Trusted Enterprise Manager. From February
14 thru March 31st, for any company which purchases $1,000.00 worth
of any product from Sunbelt, MDD Inc. will provide a free 25-user
production license of TEM!
As most of you know, TEM has been the leading NT administration
solution for the past 4 years, and now MDD is helping any and all
companies prep for Windows2000. From providing easy to access reports
on your current environment, to letting you start to build naming
conventions and virtual organizational units, TEM will save you tons
of time and pain moving to W2K, and will then continue to have a
_huge_impact on your post-W2K operations.
I?ve been in this business for quite some time, and this is one of
the most timely and value-packed offers I have witnessed from any
software vendor. Free Software? Take advantage of this opportunity.
For example, just one thing that is a huge time-saver is the Multi-
select of accounts in order to make a global change of properties.
Other important features are:
1) Automated Creation, Management, and Naming of Home Directories
and Shares, user accounts, full name fields, Exchange aliases,
mailboxes, display names, and global groups.
2) Dynamic Active Directory Reporting via MDD's Directory Shadow
Repository SQL 7 Database NT, Terminal Server, and Exchange reporting
3) Simplified Drag & Drop Cut & Paste Management of Users and Groups
4) Managed Delegation with Centralized Auditing and Reporting
5) Integrated Simultaneous Exchange Management
6) Advanced Password Management (Quick Password Reset can be Randomly
Generated, User ID, or set to a Corporate Default)
More info about TEM over here. Get those PO's in before the end of
the quarter. http://www.sunbelt-software.com/product.cfm?id=255
********************************************************************
5. HINTS AND TIPS
A reason to password protect and put permissions on EVERYTHING :)
http://pc-help.org/news/scriptworm.htm
Not too malicious but....
---------------
Check out this web site. It has all of the details on the
clustering demo, and then some. Even the Data Server info!
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/news/dot-truth.asp
---------------
Need to find out what settings were changed for security reasons?
http://pedestalsoftware.com/intact/
---------------
For a bunch of cool utilities for Exchange and Outlook
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/mail.htm
---------------
********************************************************************
6. THE NT STOCK WATCH Closing Date Friday 15, 2000
52 WK 52 WK P/E WEEK
SECURITY CLOSE HIGH LOW RATIO CHNG
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Advanced Micro Devices... 41 3/8 45 1/2 14 9/16 +2.7%
BMC Software............. 39 86 5/8 30 39 -6.3%
BindView Development Corp 38 42 3/4 8 7/8 +13.2%
Citrix Systems Inc....... 100 1/16 97 15/16 13 1/4 +15.6%
Compaq Computer.......... 26 1/16 35 3/8 18 1/4 77 +3.9%
Computer Associates...... 65 13/16 79 7/16 32 1/8 52 -7.6%
Data Return Corporation.. 64 73 1/4 13 3/4 -1.7%
Dell Computer............ 41 1/4 53 31/32 31 3/8 68 +2.9%
Electronic Data Systems C 69 76 11/16 45 7/16 82 +5.5%
Gateway Inc.............. 69 13/16 84 28 3/8 53 +23.5%
Hewlett Packard Co....... 124 5/8 132 26 1/2 39 -3.3%
Intergraph Corp.......... 5 9/16 10 1/4 3 3/16 -13.5%
International Business Ma 106 139 3/16 81 1/2 26 -5.7%
Legato Systems Inc....... 40 3/4 82 1/2 15 1/8 +28.0%
Micron Electronics Inc... 11 9/16 16 9 28 -2.1%
Microsoft Corp........... 91 5/16 119 15/16 72 3/8 56 -3.9%
Mission Critical Software 62 1/4 77 5/8 16 -2.5%
NCR Corp................. 39 3/16 54 9/16 26 11/16 11 -2.0%
NetIQ Corporation........ 73 1/2 79 1/4 14 3/4 +6.5%
Network Associates Inc... 31 7/16 51 10 1/16 +11.0%
Novell Inc............... 32 1/16 44 9/16 16 1/16 53 -6.0%
Oracle Corp.............. 70 5/8 65 1/16 10 1/2 +20.5%
Qualcomm Incorporated.... 133 9/16 200 8 1/4 -0.6%
Seagate Technology....... 46 5/8 48 13/16 25 1/8 11 +3.6%
Silicon Graphics......... 8 11/16 18 7/8 6 7/8 -2.7%
Sun Microsystems Inc..... 93 3/4 97 1/4 23 5/8 +1.0%
Sybase Inc............... 23 5/16 25 5 5/16 32 +9.0%
Symantec Corp............ 71 3/4 69 3/8 12 1/2 26 +12.1%
Unisys Corp.............. 31 1/16 49 11/16 20 15/16 19 -5.1%
Veritas Software Corp.... 181 3/16 191 1/64 20 3/8 +4.6%
Dow Jones 30 Industrials. 9,862.12 -3.4%
********************************************************************
6. "HOW TO USE THE MAILING LIST" Instructions on how to subscribe,
sign off or change your email address
TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LIST (Tell your friends!)
Click:
http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/lyris.pl?join=nt-list
and fill out the form, simple & easy: 1 minute work.
Or by email, send a blank message to the following address:
[email protected]
_____________________________________________________
TO QUIT THE LIST
1) The Web Way:
http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/lyris.pl?
choose the NT-List, use your email address that is at
the bottom of each newsletter and leave the list via
the web interface.
2) The Email Way: Simply follow the personalized
instructions at the very end of this newsletter.
_____________________________________________________
TO CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS
First unsubscribe and then resubscribe as per the
procedure above.
********************************************************************
FOR MORE INFORMATION
On the World Wide Web point your browser to:
For the newsletter and our website:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com
For Tech Support on Sunbelt products mentioned:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/rightnow.exe
Email for US sales information to:
[email protected]
Email for US Tech support to:
[email protected]
Email to the US Editor:
[email protected]
Email for European Sales to:
[email protected]
Email for European Tech support to:
[email protected]
At the time of this newsletter's release, all links were
checked to verify their accuracy and validity. However,
due to the ever changing pages of various sites, some links
may later prove to be invalid. We regret any inconvenience
should you be unable to open any of these links.
********************************************************************
Things Our Lawyers Make Us Say:
This document is provided for informational purposes only.
The information contained in this document represents the
current view of Sunbelt Software Distribution on the issues
discussed as of the date of publication. Because Sunbelt
must respond to changes in market conditions, it should not
be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Sunbelt
and Sunbelt cannot guarantee the accuracy of any informa-
tion presented after the date of publication.
INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED "AS IS"
WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
FREEDOM FROM INFRINGEMENT.
The user assumes the entire risk as to the accuracy and the
use of this document. This document may be copied and
distributed subject to the following conditions: 1) All text
must be copied without modification and all pages must be
included; 2) All copies must contain Sunbelt's copyright
notice and any other notices provided therein; and 3) This
document may not be distributed for profit. All trademarks
acknowledged. Copyright Sunbelt Software Distribution, Inc.
1996-2000.
(email me with feedback: [email protected])